Interviews with never-married women, aged sixty-five and older, will be conducted to explore the informal support systems they have created at different points in their life cycle, their adaptive responses to the marginality of single status, and their strategies for grappling with actual or potential chronic illness or disability. Another central objective is to identify never-married old women's means of preventing or coping with emotional depressions, isolation, and loneliness. An underlying hypothesis of this study is that old never-married women have found ways to sustain themselves throughout single lives constructed in a coupled world which may constitute prototypical measures or orientations useful to men and women in the elderly population who find themselves newly single at widowhood. Taped interviews with fifty never-married older women will be conducted. Their ages will range from 65 to approximately 100. The women will be drawn from diverse class, racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. They will represent a continuum of health statuses, from completely healthy to chronically ill. A semi-structured interview, 1 1/2-2 1/2 hours in length, will be conducted with each subject. Topics to be explored in the interviews include friendship history; family intimacy patterns; health, economic, work, and educational history; attitudes toward self, women, marriage, work, and aging; past and current links with neighborhood and community; and current health, mental health, mobility, and dependency issues.